Nightmare Alley

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Has anyone seen this I'm thinking of getting it. Has a controversial kind of tag, quite brutal etc..I have seen most of the classic Noirs but not this one. Like Kiss me Deadly, Night of Hunter, Gun Crazy etc.. Worth it????? Actually trying to decide between this and Mildred Pierce.

Hoately grabbed the youth by the shirt front and drew him nearer. “Listen, kid. Do I have to draw you a damn blueprint? You pick up a guy and he ain’t a geek—he’s a drunk. A bottle-a-day booze fool. So you tell him like this: ‘I got a little job for you. It’s a temporary job. We got to get a new geek. So until we do you’ll put on the geek outfit and fake it.’ You tell him, ‘You don’t have to do nothing. You’ll have a razor blade in your hand and when you pick up the chicken you give it a nick with the blade and then make like you’re drinking the blood. Same with rats. The marks don’t know no different.”’

Hoately ran his eye up and down the midway, sizing up the crowd. He turned back to Stan. “Well, he does this for a week and you see to it that he gets his bottle regular and a place to sleep it off in. He likes this fine. This is what he thinks is heaven. So after a week you say to him like this, you say, ‘Well, I got to get me a real geek. You’re through.’ He scares up at this because nothing scares a real rummy like the chance of a dry spell and getting the horrors. He says, ‘What’s the matter? Ain’t I doing okay?’ So you say, ‘Like crap you’re doing okay. You can’t draw no crowd faking a geek. Turn in your outfit. You’re through.’ Then you walk away. He comes following you, begging for another chance and you say, ‘Okay. But after tonight out you go.’ But you give him his bottle.

“That night you drag out the lecture and lay it on thick. All the while you’re talking he’s thinking about sobering up and getting the crawling shakes. You give him time to think it over, while you’re talking. Then throw in the chicken. He’ll geek.”

Hadn't seen this in a long while. First half-hour is great, esp that scene where Power preps the way for the death of his drunken obstacle (Ian Keith) to Joan Blondell and a career.

The rest of it's alright -- including Coleen Gray, until she gets the "You can't go against God" duties -- but the psychoanalyst fatale thing is kinda on-the-nose misogynistic, and Hoberman had a point calling it "excitingly tawdry, as well as self-defeatingly slick."

Guillermo del Toro will co-write (with Kim Morgan), direct, and produce a remake of Edmund Goulding’s Nightmare Alley, reports Variety’s Justin Kroll, noting that the original “starred Tyrone Power as an ambitious young con-man who hooks up with a female psychiatrist who is even more corrupt than he is. At first, they enjoy success fleecing people with their mentalist act, but then she turns the table on him, out-manipulating the manipulator.”